About the release

ColdFusion MX 6.1 adds significant compiler and compatibility enhancements to ColdFusion MX. This release provides substantial performance and scalability improvements over all previous versions of ColdFusion. In addition to many bug fixes, this release contains some long sought-after functional feature enhancements.

What's new in this Release

The following areas have had substantial improvements, including functional enhancements:

Performance: Runtime performance has been enhanced, thus delivering radically improved application performance and scalability over ColdFusion MX, ColdFusion 5, and ColdFusion 4.5. Significant changes have also been made to the CFML compiler, reducing initial template compilation time by an order of magnitude.

Installer: The installer has been rebuilt to streamline the installation process and to provide greater reliability.

OS support: This has been expanded to include Windows 2003 (and IIS 6.0), Red Hat 7.3, 8, and 9, and SuSE 8.

CFMAIL:* Enhancements to the cfmail tag deliver a new industrial-strength, high-performance mail handler, which can support more than 1,000,000 e-mail messages per hour. It features new multithreading, connection pooling, server failover, spool-to-memory, support for multipart mail messages (HTML and plain text) with the new cfmailpart tag, support for SMTP authentication, and improved character set encoding.

CFHTTP: Enhancements include support for the full set of HTTP 1.1 operations (GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS), full control over the content of any HTTP request (headers and body), and timeout and proxy support.

CFPOP: The cfpop tag now supports retrieval of both text/plain and text/html message parts.

Web services: Powerful new web services invocation functionality includes the ability to specify timeouts and proxy settings, and to invoke over SSL.

ColdFusion components (CFCs): Fixes and improvements to CFCs address a number of outstanding issues, improve the use of scopes, and allow access to overridden methods with the Super keyword.

COM: ColdFusion MX 6.1 further improves the performance and interoperability of cfobject tag and CreateObject function calls to COM objects compared to ColdFusion MX Updater 3. For details, see COM Fixes and Enhancements.

CFLOGIN: The cflogin tag can be tied to sessions instead of cookies (default), and supports NTLM/Digest security.

Character sets: ColdFusion MX 6.1 improves the Chinese-Japanese-Korean customer experience by removing the need to explicitly declare charsets/character encodings in most situations.

General bug fixes: In addition to the enhancements listed previously, ColdFusion MX 6.1 also fixes more than 400 bugs beyond those addressed in Updater 3. The Resolved Issues list provides details on more than 200 of these fixed bugs.

* Some features may not be available in all editions of ColdFusion MX.

Installation

Introduction

The ColdFusion MX 6.1 installer lets you install a version of ColdFusion MX 6.1 in the server configuration (formerly known as standalone) or in the J2EE configuration.

Server configuration - Lets you install one instance of ColdFusion with an embedded J2EE server. This configuration most closely resembles previous releases of ColdFusion.

J2EE configuration - Lets you deploy ColdFusion on a J2EE application server, either using the bundled license of Macromedia JRun or using a third-party J2EE server, such as IBM WebSphere, Sun ONE Application Server, or BEA WebLogic. When using the J2EE configuration, you must complete the installation by deploying the ColdFusion MX application into your application server environment and configuring Java settings. Complete J2EE application server deployment instructions are available in the ColdFusion Support Center . When using the J2EE configuration, you can deploy ColdFusion multiple times on a single computer. In addition, the ColdFusion MX 6.1 installer lets you optionally install JRun and automatically deploy ColdFusion MX in a separate JRun server.

The installation process has two parts: Installation Wizard and Configuration and Settings Migration Wizard.

If you are upgrading from ColdFusion 5, the Configuration and Settings Migration Wizard will migrate data sources and other settings to ColdFusion MX 6.1, in addition to configuring ColdFusion.

If you are updating a ColdFusion MX installation, the Installation Wizard functions as an updater.

Installation notes

The following notes include important information and late-breaking news.

ColdFusion MX 6.1 cannot be installed into a directory with spaces in the name. For example, you cannot install into a directory in the "C:\Program Files" directory. If you are specifying a directory for a new server installation, or a directory for installing an EAR or WAR file, ColdFusion MX displays an error message if you specify a path that includes a space. If you have an existing ColdFusion server installation with spaces in the cf_root directory path, the installer lets you update, but, due to JVM limitations, you might encounter errors when installing or running ColdFusion MX. If your current installation has spaces in its path, it is safest to uninstall ColdFusion, reinstall to a path without spaces, and then install ColdFusion MX 6.1.

The Windows installer requires a computer that supports at least 256 colors.

To use RedHat Linux 7.3, 8.0, or 9, the Linux installation must have the corresponding RedHat libc compatibility libraries to run ColdFusion MX 6.1, as follows:

Users must have 6.2-2.x or later for RedHat 7.3 or 7.3-2.x for RedHat 8.0 or 9.

The installation documentation indicates that if you use the Apache 2.0.x web server, you must have version 2.0.43 or later. If you have RedHat 8.0 or 9, you can also use ColdFusion MX 6.1 with the 2.0.40 web server that is provided by RedHat.

To use ColdFusion MX 6.1 with Apache 1.3.x web servers on RedHat 8 or 9, you must compile a connector. To do this, use the connector sources in cf_root\runtime\connectors\src\ApacheModule.zip if you install the server configuration and cf_root\connectors\src\ApacheModule.zip if you install the ColdFusion MX J2EE configuration on JRun. Instructions are located in ApacheBuildInstructions.txt in the same directory.

Documentation

The following list describes changes in the ColdFusion documentation for ColdFusion MX 6.1 and includes links to the latest versions of the documentation in the Macromedia LiveDocs system. The LiveDocs documentation includes comments and updates to the documentation that might be made after the product is released. The documentation is also installed in HTML format with ColdFusion MX 6.1, and PDF copies of the documentation are available from the Macromedia website.

CFML Reference This book includes all new or changed tags, attributes, functions, and parameters, and documents any new or changed behaviors. To find major changes, search for "6.1".

Developing Applications with ColdFusion MX This book has an updated ColdFusion Component (CFC) chapter that describes the enhanced CFC behavior in ColdFusion MX 6.1, including changed Application scope behavior and the new Super keyword. It also has improved globalization documentation that includes information on the tags and functions that can use locales and character encodings.

Configuring and Administering ColdFusion MX This book has new chapters on the web server connector and on using multiple server instances when deploying ColdFusion MX 6.1 as a J2EE application on JRun 4. This revised manual also includes the chapters formerly in the Working with Verity Tools book.

Getting Started with ColdFusion MX This book has been slightly revised. The supporting files are only installed if you install the example applications when running the Configuration and Settings Migration Wizard.